Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday May 14, 2013 @02:09AM
from the indirect-terrorism dept.

An anonymous reader sent in this excerpt from Moxie Marlinspike's weblog:
"Last week I was contacted by an agent of Mobily, one of two telecoms operating in Saudi Arabia, about a surveillance project that they're working on in that country. Having published two reasonably popular MITM tools, it's not uncommon for me to get emails requesting that I help people with their interception projects. I typically don't respond, but this one (an email titled 'Solution for monitoring encrypted data on telecom') caught my eye. ... The requirements are the ability to both monitor and block mobile data communication, and apparently they already have blocking setup. ... When they eventually asked me for a price quote, and I indicated that I wasn't interested in the job for privacy reasons, they responded with this: ' I know that already and I have same thoughts like you freedom and respecting privacy, actually Saudi has a big terrorist problem and they are misusing these services for spreading terrorism and contacting and spreading their cause that's why I took this and I seek your help. If you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those who curb the freedom with their brutal activities.'"

The ruling al-Saud family will soon have to come with a follow-up for the current king. In the same time, a complete army of foreign experts & technicians is required to keep the entire Saudi infrastructure ( telco, roads, water supply, power generation ) running. Moreover, the Saudi government is continuously spying upon its citizens, as a habit. Women are slowly beginning to protest against the enormous discrimination and contempt they live under.

All of this taken together mixes up quite explosively. Mark my words: 25 years from now, Saudi Arabia as we know it will have gone down

The ruling al-Saud family will soon have to come with a follow-up for the current king. In the same time, a complete army of foreign experts & technicians is required to keep the entire Saudi infrastructure ( telco, roads, water supply, power generation ) running. Moreover, the Saudi government is continuously spying upon its citizens, as a habit. Women are slowly beginning to protest against the enormous discrimination and contempt they live under.

All of this taken together mixes up quite explosively. Mark my words: 25 years from now, Saudi Arabia as we know it will have gone down

Sooner than that, I think. The succession passes brother to brother among the sons of Abdulaziz. The youngest was born in the mid 1940s. The available heirs are getting older and older very very fast.

When the brothers are all gone, Saudi Arabia will fall into chaos and that could happen in the next few years.

And what about the chaos in the mean time? Also there is no guarantee religious fanatics would be willing to play by rational rules. They would be more likely to hold the oil supply hostage as a weapon.

The discrimination against women is not a result of the royal family. It's a result of the capitulation of the royal family to the demands of the religious fanatics to avoid seeming insufficiently Islamic. If the house of Saud falls, things will get much, much worse for anybody who isn't a straight, Sunni Muslim, male.

The house of Saudi is essentially ceremonial, like the Queen of England. The terrorists already run the country, and with western/eastern help have spread worldwide, who, in case you haven't noticed, are reveling in the total destruction. So when the Great Pirates once again bring order to the galaxy, they will be heroes.

Mark my words: 25 years from now, Saudi Arabia as we know it will have gone down

I agree with you, but my fear is that what's going to replace it will be much much worse. The Arab Spring has shown that if given the choice, Muslims will choose to enslave themselves in repressive Islamo-fascist regimes. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the successor regime to the House of Saud ends up being Osama Bin Laden's dream government. Even Turkey has gone backwards. 10 years ago they had a legitimate shot at joining the EU and now the unspoken truth is that the EU will never let them in becau

Far be it from me to make fun of a bad situation, but I wonder if the spin doctors who come up with these labels for their legitimate opponents have a BOFH-style excuse calendar to pick who they're blaming everything on this month?

Yes, Saudi Arabia is bad, but anything that keeps the Muslims under control is better than letting them have their way.... which is not giving them freedom but allowing them to murder, kill, and rape others as well as killing

Are people modding this down because they don't like the facts? Chrisq has given references from reliable sources showing that where there has been a popular uprising in an Islamic country things have got worse. Do you dispute this or do you just not like the truth?

Yes, because there is certainly no pattern there. It's not like these were all moderate Muslim countries whose dictators were overthrown and whose populace elected radical Muslims into power the second they got democracy.

Dunno, seems to me that the world's democracies have outlasted any Islamic nation's form of government, and are still doing pretty well -- and better and better relative to those Islamic nations over the course of time.

Dunno, seems to me that the world's democracies have outlasted any Islamic nation's form of government, and are still doing pretty well -- and better and better relative to those Islamic nations over the course of time.

Thats because the foundational principle of the modern democracy is to keep the mass of people believing that they have some say in things and to preserve this illusion by presenting the face of a chaotic, randomly changing elected government. Democratically 'elected' government is about as organised as Brownian motion.

The reality, which is where the extreme stability comes in, is that the elections are a sham and the real power is wielded well behind the scenes by powers that can make or break any elected

No, they'd be something akin to a wiretap warrant issued by (mostly) just judges following (mostly) just laws.

They do have significant terror issues and want to be able to do these intercepts...

The problem is their track record on human rights. Being ruled by just laws is a human right. It's upto Moxie. But have you considered the implications of moxie revealing this man's name. Think about it Mr...? Mr. Anonymous Coward.

And btw, your govt. is *able* to intercept communications. Including this. But I thin

I used to get this line a lot after writing some papers on/developing a darknet. I was even harassed about it by a government employee at a conference.

It's the same old weary rhetoric they use to push controversial legislation; Terrorism and child protection. These are the two things that governments have spread enough FUD about to immediately silence any debate on the protection of privacy.

It's not just citizens under oppressive regimes that have to operate under the premise that they are being monitored.

That's really the best line they can come up with? I just got a faint ping on my dubiousonar.

well, they had to come up with SOMETHING.you know, since their emails were being read by the state thought police and of course they know it.

once you get enough gestapo going on in a country, the communications cease to be to the person they're addressed to and end up being done for the sake of the people running surveillance - and even the people running the surveillance come trapped in the surveillance - like 4 stasi agents ratting each other out after trying to get each other to perform some crime or ano

Being fair though, while the line was a bit over the top starring sylvester stallone, it was pretty valid to make.

Moxie refused for a set of reasons, the agent pointed out that by refusing for those reasons, that though the work could possibly be used to violate principals Moxie does not wish violated -- that by refusing the work, Moxie would be allowing a greater form of evil to continue for fear of creating a smaller form of evil.

I mean, I'm not saying I AGREE with anyone here, but I believe that's what t

I'm glad you used quotes around "arab spring", in reality it has turned out to be an islamist winter [washingtontimes.com].

That's from Oct. 2011. "This won't turn out well, kids!"

Why does it appear we're experiencing a full court press denouncing the Arab Spring this morning? Were you guys there poo pooing Hungary's and Czechoslovakia's attempted revolts too? Revolutions can be messy and all of these countries have a lot of messy stuff lingering from their previous regimes. We're still waiting for Russia to get over its problems after "getting rid of the Soviets" (chyaa, right!). Hell, we're still waiting for the UK to get

"There must be no doubt that the United States of America welcomes change that advances self-determination and opportunity,” President Obama said in May. In his typically weak manner, he also cautioned that, “we must proceed with a sense of humility."

1. He is correct about the humility. Unless we are interested in creating a proper constitution that does not allow religion in lawmaking, with associated 15+ year pacification-level military involvement, i.e. 10x more, more like what we did after

If you don't do it, somebody will. If the price is right, why not that somebody be me ? We are living the biggest capitalist economy of the world. And money makes the world go round, despite what some nut-jobs believe...

No, rotational inertia makes the world go round. Money is a very recent addition that facilitates trade and allows a select (lucky/ruthless) few to accumulate and leverage wealth far in excess of anything our ancestors could have dreamed of. Not everyone agrees that it's the best way to run the world, and many of us consider things like principles, compassion, etc. to be the more valuable assets.

Why would a western agent care? Technology export restrictions? We already know the Saudi's are doing this sort of thing, and much of the west is already using or at least developing such tools to monitor their own populace.

"One of the design documents that they volunteered specifically called out compelling a [certificate authority] in the jurisdiction of the UAE or Saudi Arabia to produce SSL certificates that they could use for interception," Marlinspike wrote in a blog post.

Clearly there is something wrong with the public key infrastructure on the web.

' I know that already and I have same thoughts like you freedom and respecting privacy, actually Saudi has a big terrorist problem and they are misusing these services for spreading terrorism and contacting and spreading their cause that's why I took this and I seek your help. If you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those who curb the freedom with their brutal activities.'"

Is this a quote from the Saudi government? Sounds like something Canada's Vic Toews would say. Or maybe somebody from Washington D.C.....

You're expecting too much. I've yet to find a business anywhere that didn't send out personal communications with poor spelling and grammar and punctuation, and I've yet to find out that hasn't posted signage on their premises somewhere that is void of typos.

If I see one more " thank's! " in my life.. it won't matter, because one is already too many. how do you even fucking make a mistake like that good fucking.....

I think the western governments would be a bit more clever than that. They have the resources to develop their own home grown spying tools. They don't need an outside consultant, which is what this guy would have been. Otherwise you'd be hearing about this kind of stuff all the time.

I think the western governments would be a bit more clever than that. They have the resources to develop their own home grown spying tools. They don't need an outside consultant, which is what this guy would have been. Otherwise you'd be hearing about this kind of stuff all the time.

Western governments employ a more than a few [washingtonpost.com] outside contractors for 'electronic operations'(and quite a few others for other purposes). They just aren't generally foolish enough to contact known, high-profile, security researchers with a history of publicity for sensitive work...

Well I guess that's your view then. I specifically didn't mention any nation, only "the job".

It's about high fucking time people in the western world realise that freedom cannot be passive. You can't just sit back in your armchair and blab. Be offensive, do a number on these scumbags. If he really, really cared about privacy he would have fought for the millions of people who are going to be spied on anyway, just not with his tool. This applies equally to the UK as it does to Saudi Arabia, this story just h

Messing with national governments can be a very dangerous game. If they found out he was planting a backdoor halfway through the project things could go south in a real hurry, and they'd have to be very incompetent not to have some sort of double blind checks in place. Even if he never entered the country he'd have to avoid it and everywhere it has an extradition treaty with (like India) forever. And what gain? Evidence that they are suppressing dissent, persecuting women? We already know that.

That's nice, except that the issue with the Saudi regime *itself* is that it's as much a part of the problem of terrorism as it is of the solution. That is, it presents two different faces to the world- the one it likes to present to the West, and the one it likes to present to the Wahhabist elements [wikipedia.org] within the country. They need to not merely tolerate, but pander to the latter in order to remain power.

(For those who didn't want to read the linked article, the tl;dr version is that Wahhabism is the Saudi-founded brand of Islam that Al-Qaeda et al espouse; if you've ever heard the term "Islamo-fascism", Wahhabism is the interpretation of Islam it's most likely referring to).

In other words, the Saudi regime is in the position of having to be blatantly two-faced about this; claiming to be cracking down on terrorism to their Western allies, while at the same time being one of the largest supporters of it.

Of course, the West knows this, but likes to pretend otherwise, because there's the inconvenient fact that they have lots of oil which we want. Regarding Western attitudes towards extremist Islamic terrorism, Saudi Arabia isn't merely the elephant in the room in the sense that it's a major factor- as the home and the heart of Wahhabism, it's arguably *the* central factor. Modern Saudi Arabia was *founded* on an agreement between Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab (the founder of Wahhabism) and the house of Saud to spread his teachings while the latter retained power. From Wikipedia:-

Upon arriving in Diriyya, a pact was made between Ibn Saud and Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, by which Ibn Saud pledged to implement and enforce Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab's teachings, while Ibn Saud and his family would remain the temporal "leaders" of the movement.

Many of the alleged grievances of terrorists supporting Wahhabist organisations such as Al-Qaeda revolve around the supposed US "occupation" of Saudi Arabia. Yet, despite all this, you'll rarely hear Western politicians attack the Saudi regime for their covert tolerance of extremist elements. Why? See the start of this paragraph.

This is perfectly right. The reason al Qaeda exists is Wahabism, and the Wahabis came to power in the first place as a part of the partnership with the Sauds. At any rate, the root cause of terrorism is Islam, which at its heart preaches all the things that the Wahabis practice. Sure, implementations vary across the Muslim empire, but the bottom line - encourage terror against Infidels until they accept Islamic supremacy - is pretty much common from Morocco to Mindanao.

How many Christian or Jewish groups are throwing acid on womens faces, beheading people for heresy, or suicide bombing crowded markets because someone in the crowd had a minor deviation in religious observance?

I bet if it was the US or UK government or some such that came a-knockin this person wouldn't have blabbed that fact all over the internets. But it's the Saudis and they're evil. Ok, I have no proof whatsoever of any potential double-standards and I'm no saint myself but just sayin.

Then you clearly don't know who Moxie Marlinspike is (which seems kind of odd, as he's an extremely well known security researcher).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_MarlinspikeAside fromt he fact that he's been championing against the certificate authority sytem because it gives the US too much power, there's also the fact that he's an anarchist (he's written anarchist pieces completely unrelated to technology, and founded the Anarchist Yacht Club). That the Saudis contacted him speaks volumes to their i

Aside from the fact that he's been championing against the certificate authority system...

Yes! I was wondering when someone would mention this! Anyone who's curious can glance at Moxie's repositories on Github. It is exactly as you described, about his efforts to make a better certificate authority system. I don't know if it was because it gave the U.S. too much power, or because it was not especially reliable (I think DigiNotar or Digi something cert auth break happened around then), many other issues.

I have mixed feelings about Moxie. He's very much the Anarchist, rebel hax00r. But he isn't i

If it was real, I'd be a bit leery about posting details to the public in a way that identifies himself. You never know if an Al-Saud crony might off him. That family themselves HAVE been tied to terrorist groups, or at least certain members of them.

Are we talking about the same Moxie Marlinspike?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_MarlinspikeWho wrote things like:http://convergence.io/details.htmlhttps://github.com/WhisperSystems/RedPhonehttps://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/(aguably the most used encrypted communications apps for Android)http://tack.io/http://www.audioanarchy.org/http://www.blueanarchy.org/https://www.cloudcracker.com/

I could go on. Hell, I haven't even gotten to the talks he's done and the vulnerabilities he's disclosed.Seriously, if you're that dismissive of Moxie Marlinspike, you MUST have cured a major disease or something. Please, do tell.

I'm really surprised that Moxie isn't more well-known around here. I just commented earlier about Moxie's Github repositories. I'm not a sycophant, and realize that Moxie has a lot of fans. He has done good work, regardless of politics or advocacy.

No, Saudi Arabia is very westernized in terms of dress and hygiene, as well as technology. People usually go there to strike it rich, because westerners get paid a ton of money to work on projects there. Still though, in the end they follow islamic traditions, many of which have horrible consequences if you violate.

That would have been akin to suicide. Not only is that a serious contract violation, this is a security breach in a country with both significant funds and extreme interests from several Western and Eastern intelligence agencies.

Pulling off shit like that is a sure ticket to one day being added to list of people who vanished without trace or getting found dead from overdose of drugs in a hotel room. People in intelligence have decades of experience in tracking people like OP when they work for them and find